House Bill 1576-legislation will make it much harder to designate streams as Wild Trout Waters in Pennsylvania, putting native and wild trout populations at risk and limiting future fishing opportunities.

Posted on: 2013/11/14 11:10

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I'm Locked In Tight and Out of Range. I Used To Care But Things Have Changed. Bob Dylan

I've look into this too....my main concerns are who would make up the review board and will all current wild trout streams, class A streams, and wilderness streams be grandfathered in or reviewed as to their current status.

Without those answers I can't really make an educated decision on this bill.

As far as I can tell, it does not actually say that it will be harder to designate a stream as 'a wild trout stream', what it does is take the ability to do so away from the PFBC and gives it to a separate committee.

The only reason that I can think of to do this is so that industry can purchase seats on the committee and make it impossible to designate streams as 'wild trout streams'.

The question was asked about grandfathering existing streams. I think the bill only mentions designating, so I believe that existing streams with a designation would remain. That is until ...

The next obvious step is to review the existing designations under the new policy and in no time at all we will have no HQ or EV streams.

[quote]
The_Sasquatch wrote:
The Potter County Enterprise had a fairly well balanced review of this bill last month. Pointed out a few things that groups like TU aren't pointing out. [/quote]
Is this the review?
If so, that is not a review, it is a snow job by the guy that introduced the bill.
Coal power plants are shutting down all over mussels or no mussels because they can't afford to run the clean enough.
The snakes in Arizona are not the same sub-species as the snakes that are only found (in PA) in four swamps in western PA.

Here's more discussion that has been had on this board. If you haven't watched the committee meeting video that vcregular posted in that thread, you definitely need to take the time to check it out. The overflow of blatant ignorance made me cringe several times while watching. Scary stuff.

troutbert wrote:In the article State Representative Jeff Pyle says a power plant has been shut down because of endangered mussels.

Is that true?

If so, which power plant?

As I said in a previous post, blaming this on mussels is BS. Read this.

Other than a reference to Pennsylvania as one of the states with coal plants to be shut down, where is the connection to mussels? If there is a specific plant that was shut down, I'd be curious which one. Just like the Massauga in AZ absurdity should be called out in our politicians, so should tilting at mussel-shutdown windmills (er, plants).

I understand your point that coal plants are being shutdown, but it doesn't necessarily follow that invoking mussels is a smokescreen for that happening, with this bill. In other words, coal plants being shutdown by the EPA doesn't preclude there being a mussel induced plant shutdown.

The quote in our paper from one of the reps who sponsored the bill was that he had been offered no assurances by Republicans that a floor vote would even be called. Committee vote was 16 for, 8 against.